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A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with a set of
"keys" that, when pressed, cause characters
to be printed on a medium, usually paper. From
their invention before 1870 through much of the 20th century,
typewriters were indispensable tools for many professional writers
and in business offices.By the end of the 1980s, word processor applications on personal computers had largely replaced
the tasks previously accomplished with typewriters. Typewriters,
however, remain popular in the developing world and among some
niche markets, and for some office
tasks.

History

Early innovations

No single person invented the typewriter. As with the automobile, telephone,
and telegraph, a number of people
contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in
commercially successful instruments. In fact, historians have
estimated that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as
tinkerers tried to come up with a workable design.

In 1714, Henry Mill obtained a patent in
Britain for a machine that, from the patent, appears to have been
similar to a typewriter, but nothing further is known. Other early
developers of typewriting machines include Pellegrino Turri, who also invented
carbon paper. Many of these early
machines, including Turri's, were developed to enable the blind to
write.

In 1829, William Austin Burt
patented a machine called the "Typowriter" which, in common with many other
early machines, is listed as the "first typewriter". The Science
Museum describes it merely as "the first writing mechanism
whose invention was documented," but even that claim may be
excessive, since Turri's invention pre-dates it. Even in the
hands of its inventor, this machine was slower than handwriting.
Burt and his promoter John D.Sheldon never found a buyer for the
patent, and it was never commercially produced. Because the
typographer used a dial, rather than keys, to select each
character, it was called an "index typewriter" rather than a
"keyboard typewriter," although it is debatable whether it should
be considered a typewriter at all.

By the mid-1800s, the increasing pace of business communication had
created a need for mechanization of the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates
up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited
to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record).

From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented
by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial
production.

Charles Thurber developed
multiple patents, of which his first in 1843, was developed as an
aid to the blind, such as the 1845 Chirographer. In 1855, the ItalianGiuseppe Ravizza created a prototype
typewriter called Cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a
tasti ("Scribe harpsichord, or
machine for writing with keys"). It was an advanced machine
that let the user see the writing as it was typed. In 1861, Father
Francisco João de
Azevedo, a Brazilian priest, made his own typewriter with basic
materials and tools, such as wood and knives. In that same year the
Brazilian emperor D.Pedro I, presented a gold medal to Father
Azevedo for this invention. Many Brazilian people as well as the
Brazilian federal government recognize Fr. Azevedo as the real
inventor of the typewriter, a claim that has been the subject of
some controversy. In 1865, American John Pratt built a machine
called the Pterotype which appeared in an 1867
Scientific American
article and inspired other inventors. Between 1864 and 1867
Peter Mitterhofer, a carpenter from South
Tyrol (then part of Austria) developed
several models and a fully functioning prototype typewriter in
1867.

In 1865, Rev. Rasmus
Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented the
Hansen Writing Ball, which went
into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially
sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported
as being used in offices in London as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen
used a solenoid escapement to return the
carriage on some of his models which makes him a candidate for the
title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. According to
the book Hvem er Skrivekuglens Op finder? (English:
Who are Writing Up takes?), written by Malling-Hansen's
daughter, Johanne Agerskov, in 1865, Malling-Hansen made a
porcelain model of the keyboard of his writing ball and
experimented with different placements of the letters to achieve
the fastest writing speed. Malling-Hansen placed the letters on
short pistons that went directly through the ball and down to the
paper. This, together with the placement of the letters so that the
fastest writing fingers struck the most frequently used letters,
made the Hansen Writing Ball the
first typewriter to produce text substantially faster than a person
could write by hand.

Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s
and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained
the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the
paper was attached to a cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the
cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing
head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented,
which was the first of the writing balls that worked without
electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in
Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize
for his invention at both exhibitions.

Because the type bars of this typewriter strike upwards, the typist
in this French postcard, c. 1910, could not have seen characters as
they were typed. The ability to view what is typed, as it is typed,
is taken for granted today. This was not the case in most early
keyboard typewriters, however, as the type
bars struck upward against the bottom of the platen and what was typed was not visible until a
carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with
any other arrangement was ensuring that the type bars fell back
into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually
achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called
"visible typewriters", such as the Oliver typewriter, were
introduced in 1895. Surprisingly, the older style continued in
production to as late as 1915.

Standardization

Typebars which became entangled when
the six keys operating the typebars were pressed
simultaneously

By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached
a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from
one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed the
concept that each key was attached to a typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in
reverse, into its striking head. To have letters typed in exact
location, the typebar was guided all its way till the ribbon by
segment. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the
typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inkedfabric) stretched in front of a cylindrical
platen that moved back and forth. The paper was rolled around by
the typewriter's platen, which was then rotated by the "carriage
return" lever (at the far left) into position for each new line of
text.

A significant innovation was the Shift
key. This key physically "shifted" either the basket of
typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket
shift", or the whole carriage, in which case the typewriter is
described as "carriage shift". This means that a different portion
of the bar would come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result
is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting
the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying the
internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to
allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case, but normally
the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special
symbols such as percent (%) and ampersand (&). With the Shift
key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were
greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors
contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain
models, such as the Barlet, had a double shift so that each key
performed three functions. These little three row machines were
very portable and could be used by journalists, etc.

However, because the Shift key required more force to push (its
mechanism was moving a much larger mass than other keys), and was
operated by the "pinky" finger (normally the weakest finger on the
hand), it was difficult to hold the Shift down for more than two or
three consecutive strokes. The "Shift Lock" key (the precursor to
the modern Caps Lock) allowed the shift
operation to be maintained indefinitely. Unlike the today's Caps
Lock, however, the Shift Lock was a two-key operation: Shift would
be held down, and the Shift Lock (normally directly above) would be
pressed simultaneously, triggering a simple lock mechanism. To
unlock, Shift was tapped again, releasing both keys and unshifting
the basket.

Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half
the width and the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most
machines allowed switching between colors, which was useful for
bookkeeping entries where negative amounts had to be in red.

In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed
under the name "Noiseless" and advertised as "silent". It was
developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was
marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. An agreement
with Remington in 1924 saw production transferred to Remington, and
a further agreement in 1929 allowed Underwood to produce it as
well. It failed, leading some observers to the conclusion that the
clickety-clack of the typical typewriter was a consumer preference.
A more likely reason is that the claims of silent operation were
simply untrue.

In a conventional typewriter the type bars are decelerated at the
end of their travel simply by impacting upon the ribbon and paper.
So-called "noiseless" typewriters have a complex lever mechanism
that decelerates the typebar mechanically and then presses it
against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to render the process
less noisy. It was not particularly successful; it certainly
reduced the high-frequency content of the sound, rendering it more
of a "clunk" than a "clack" and arguably less intrusive, but the
grandiose claims of the advertising - such as "a machine that
can be operated a few feet away from your desk - And not be
heard" - were entirely without foundation.

Electric designs

Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread
popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for
the electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker, invented by
Thomas Edison in 1870. This device
remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from
input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end
of a telegraph line.

The first
electric typewriter was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing
Company, of Stamford, Connecticut, in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer
typewriters it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual
typebars. It was not a commercial success, which may have been due
to the fact that at the time electricity had not been standardized
and current differed from city to city. The next step in the
development of the electric typewriter came in 1909, when Charles
and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletype
machine. The Krums' machine also used a typewheel rather than
individual typebars. While innovative, neither of these machines
reached business or personal consumers.

James Fields Smathers of
Kansas City invented what is considered the first practical
power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from
Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it
over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for
development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for
their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it
could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925
Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's
motors.

After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast
asked Remington for a firm contract for the next batch. However,
Remington was engaged in merger talks which would eventually result
in the creation of Remington Rand and
no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast
instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in
1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter.

In 1928, Delco, a division of
General Motors, purchased Northeast
Electric, and the typewriter business was spun off as the
Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired
by IBM, which then spent $1 million on a redesign of the
Electromatic Typewriter, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter
Model 01 in 1935. By 1958 IBM was deriving 8% of its revenue from
the sale of electric typewriters.

Electrical typewriter designs removed the direct
mechanical connection between the keys and the element that struck
the paper. Not to be confused with later electronic
typewriters, electric typewriters contained only a single
electrical component: the motor. Where the keystroke had previously
moved a typebar directly, now it engaged mechanical linkages that
directed mechanical power from the motor into the typebar.

IBM and Remington Rand electric typewriters were the leading models
until IBM introduced the IBM
Selectric typewriter in 1961, which replaced the typebars with
a spherical element (or typeball) slightly larger than a golf ball,
with reverse-image letters molded into its surface. The Selectric
used a system of latches, metal tapes, and pulleys driven by an
electric motor to rotate the ball into the correct position and
then strike it against the ribbon and platen. The typeball moved
laterally in front of the paper instead of the former
platen-carrying carriage moving the paper across a stationary print
position.

IBM Selectric II (dual Latin/Hebrew
typeball and keyboard)

Selectric II dual Latin/Hebrew
Hadar typeball

The typeball design had many advantages, especially the elimination
of "jams" (when more than one key was struck at once and the
typebars became entangled) and in the ability to change the
typeball, allowing multiple fonts to be used in a single document.
Selectric mechanisms were widely incorporated into computer
terminals in the 1960s, as they possessed obvious advantages:

The mechanism was reasonably fast and jam-free

It could produce high quality output compared to competitors
such as Teletype machines

It could be initiated by a short, low-force mechanical
action

It did not require the movement of a heavy "type basket" to
shift between lower- and upper-case

It did not require the platen roller assembly to move from side
to side (a problem with continuous-feed paper)

The IBM 2741 terminal was a popular example of a Selectric-based
computer terminal, and similar mechanisms were employed as the
console devices for many IBM System/360 computers. These mechanisms
used "ruggedized" designs compared to those in standard commercial
typewriters.

IBM also gained an advantage by marketing more heavily to schools
than did Remington, with the idea that students who learned to type
on an IBM Electric would later choose IBM typewriters over the
competition in the workplace as businesses replaced their old
manual models.

Later models of IBM Executives and Selectrics replaced inked fabric
ribbons with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or colored
powder on a clear plastic tape. These could be used only once, but
later models used a cartridge that was simple to replace. A side
effect of this technology was that the text typed on the machine
could be easily read from the used ribbon, raising issues where the
machines were used for preparing classified documents (ribbons had
to be accounted for to ensure that typists didn't carry them from
the facility).

A variation known as "Correcting Selectrics" introduced a
correction feature, where a sticky tape in front of the carbon film
ribbon could remove the black-powdered image of a typed character,
eliminating the need for little bottles of white dab-on correction
fluid and for hard erasers that could tear the paper. These
machines also introduced selectable "pitch" so that the typewriter
could be switched between pica type(10 characters per inch) and
elite type (12 per inch), even within one document. Even so, all
Selectrics were monospaced—each
character and letterspace was allotted the same width on the page,
from a capital "W" to a period. Although IBM had produced a
successful typebar-based machine with three levels of proportional
spacing, called the IBM
Executive, no proportionally spaced Selectric office typewriter
was ever introduced. There were, however, two other machines with
fully proportional spacing: the expensive Selectric Composer, which was capable of
right-margin justification and was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter, and
the more reasonably-priced IBM Electronic Typewriter 50, which was
capable of proportional spacing but not right-justifying. By 1970,
as offset printing began to replace
letterpress
printing, the Composer would be adapted as the output unit for
a typesetting system. The system included a computer-driven input
station to capture the key strokes on magnetic tape and insert the
operator's format commands, and a Composer unit to read the tape
and produce the formatted text for photo reproduction.

Some of IBM's advances were later adopted in less expensive
machines from competitors. For example, Smith-Corona electric typewriters of the 1970s
used interchangeable ribbon cartridges, including fabric, film,
erasing, and two-color versions. At about the same time, the advent
of photocopying meant that carbon copies and erasers were less and
less necessary; only the original was typed, and copies were then
made from it.

The final major development of the typewriter was the "electronic"
typewriter. Most of these replaced the typeball with a metal or
plastic daisy wheel mechanism (a disk
with the letters molded on the outside edge of the "petals"). A
plastic daisy-wheel was much simpler and cheaper than the metal
typeball, but it also wore out more easily. Some electronic
typewriters were in essence dedicated word processors with internal memory and
cartridge, magnetic card or diskette external memory-storage
devices. Unlike the Selectrics and earlier models, these really
were "electronic" and relied on integrated circuits and multiple
electromechanical components. These typewriters were sometimes
called display typewriters (cf. US patent 4,620,808) or
word-processing typewriters, though the latter term was
also frequently applied to less sophisticated machines that
featured only a tiny, sometimes just single-row display.

Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1990 to
Lexmark.

In short, as far as typewriters and word processors are concerned,
the 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition. In a given
year, most small-business offices would be completely old-style,
while large corporations and government departments would already
be all new-style; other offices would have a mixture. It was common
for clerical staff to have to learn several new systems, one after
the other, in just a few years, the pace of change was so rapid.
While such rapid change is commonplace today, and is taken for
granted, this was not always so; in fact, typewriting technology
changed very little in its first 80 or 90 years.

Typewriter/printer hybrids

Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the
1980s, a number of hybrid designs combining features of printers were introduced.

These often incorporated keyboards from existing models of
typewriters and printing mechanisms of dot-matrix printers. The generation of
teletypes with impact pin-based printing
engines was not adequate for the demanding quality required for
typed output and alternative thermal
transfer technologies used in thermal label printers had become technically feasible
for typewriters.

IBM produced a series of typewriters called
Thermotronic with letter-quality output and correcting tape along
with printers tagged Quietwriter.
Brother extended the life of
their typewriter product line with similar products. DEC meanwhile had the DECwriter.

The development of these proprietary printing engines provided the
vendors with exclusive markets in consumable ribbons and the
ability to use standardised printing engines with varying degrees
of electronic and software sophistication to develop product
lines.

Although these changes reduced prices - and greatly increased the
convenience - of typewriters, the technological disruption posed by
word processors left these
improvements with only a short-term low-end market. To extend the
life of these products, many examples were provided with
communication ports to connect them to computers as printers.

As of 2009, typewriters still were used by some government
agencies. E.g., it was reported that in 2008 New York City
purchased a few thousands typewriters, mostly for use by New York Police Department, at
the total cost of $982,269; another $99,570 were spent in 2009 for
the maintenance of the existing typewriters. New Yorkpolice
officers use the machines to type property and evidence vouchers on
carbon paper forms.

Legacy

Keyboard layouts: "QWERTY" and others

The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "QWERTY" layout for the letter keys. During the period
in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this
invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but
these are poorly documented. The near-alphabetical sequence on the
"home row" of the QWERTY layout (a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l) demonstrates
that a straightforward alphabetical arrangement was the original
starting point. The QWERTY layout of keys has become the de facto standard for English-language typewriter
and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the Latin alphabet sometimes use variants of the
QWERTY layouts, such as the French AZERTY,
the Italian QZERTY, the Portuguese HCESAR and the German QWERTZ
layouts.

The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible, since
it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows
to type the most common letters. A popular story suggests that it
was designed and used for early typewriters exactly
because it was so inefficient; it slowed
a typist down so as to reduce the frequency of the typewriter's
typebars wedging together and jamming the machine. Another story is
that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress
their customers by being able to easily type out the example word
"typewriter" without having learnt the full keyboard layout,
because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the
keyboard. The most likely explanation is that the QWERTY
arrangement was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal
clashing by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther
from each other inside the machine. This allowed the user to type
faster without jamming. Unfortunately, no definitive explanation
for the QWERTY keyboard has been found, and typewriter aficionados
continue to debate the issue.

A number of radically different layouts such as Dvorak have been proposed to
reduce the perceived inefficiencies of QWERTY, but none have been
able to displace the QWERTY layout; their proponents claim
considerable advantages, but so far none has been widely used. The
Blickensderfer typewriter
with its DHIATENSOR layout may have
possibly been the first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout
for efficiency advantages.

Many old typewriters do not contain a separate key for the numeral
1 or the exclamation point, and some even older ones also lack the
numeral zero. Typists who learned on these machines learned the
habit of using the lowercase letter l for the digit 1, and the
uppercase O for the zero. The exclamation point was a three-stroke
combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. These
characters were omitted to simplify design and reduce manufacturing
and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they
were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. On modern
keyboards, the exclamation point is the shifted character on the 1
key, a direct result of the heritage that these were the last
characters to become "standard" on keyboards. Holding the spacebar
pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism,
allowing to type multiple symbols on a single location. The ¢
symbol (meaning cents) was located above the number 6 on old
typewriters. Modern keyboards now use ^ above the 6.

Many non-Latin alphabets have keyboard layouts that have nothing to
do with QWERTY. The Russian layout, for instance, puts the common
trigrams ыва, про, and ить on adjacent keys so that they can be
typed by rolling the fingers. The Greek layout, on the other hand,
is a variant of QWERTY.

Typewriters were also made for East
Asian languages with thousands of characters, such as Chinese or Japanese. They were not easy to operate,
but professional typists used them for a long time until the
development of electronic word processors in the 1980s.

Computer jargon

Several words of the typewriter age have survived into the personal
computer era. Examples include:

backspace – a keystroke that moved the
cursor backwards one position (on a physical platen, this is the
exact opposite of the space key), for the purpose of overtyping a
character. This could be for combining characters (e.g. an
apostrophe, backspace, and period make an exclamation point - a
character missing on some early typewriters), or for correction
such as with the correcting tape that developed later.

carriage return (CR) –
indicating an end of line and return to the first column of
text.

cursor – a marker used to
indicate where the next character will be printed.

cut and paste – taking text, a
table, or an image and pasting it into a document. The term
originated when such compound documents were created using manual
paste up techniques: actual brushes and
paste were very early on replaced by hot-wax machines equipped with
cylinders that applied melted wax to developed prints of "typeset"
copy. This copy was then cut with knives and rulers and slid into
position on layout sheets on slanting tables. After the "copy" had
been correctly positioned and squared up using a T-square and set
square, it was pressed down with a brayer, or roller. The whole
point of the exercise was to create so-called "camera-ready copy"
which existed only to be photographed and then printed, usually by
offset lithography.

line feed (LF), aka "newline" –
standing for moving the cursor to the next
on-screen line of text in a word processor document.

Shift – a modifier
key used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper"
characters, would previously shift a typewriter's print carriage to
allow a different stamp (such as 'D' instead of 'd') to press into
the ribbon and print on a page.

Effect on culture

"Get out!

Can't you see I'm busy."

Early 20th century humorous postcard; boss man puts his arm
around female typist.

When Remington first started marketing typewriters, the company
assumed the machine would not be used for composing but for
transcribing dictation, and that the person typing would be a
woman. Flowers were printed on the casing of early models to make
the machine seem more comfortable for women to use. In the United
States, women often started in the professional workforce as
typists (called "typewriters" then); in fact, according to the 1910
U.S. census, 81 percent of typists were female. With more women
coming out of the home and into offices, there was some concern
about the effects this would have on the morals of society. The
"typewriter girl" became part of the
iconography of the early-twentieth-century office. The "Tijuana bibles"—adult comic books produced in
Mexico for the American market, starting in the 1930s—often
featured women typists. In one panel, a businessman in a
three-piece suit, ogling his secretary’s thigh, says, "Miss Higby,
are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?"

The famous quote by Marcus Glenn, "Live by the typewriter, die by
the typewriter!" also dates from this period.

Correction methods

According to the standards taught in secretarial schools in the
mid-1900s, a business letter was
supposed to have no mistakes and no visible corrections. Accuracy
was prized as much as speed. Indeed, typing speeds, as scored in
proficiency tests and typewriting speed competitions, included a
deduction of ten words for every mistake. Corrections were, of
course, necessary, and several methods were used.

The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special
typewriter eraser made of hard rubber that contained an abrasive
material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2
in (50 mm) in diameter by 1/8 in (3 mm) thick, with a
brush attached from the center, while others looked like pink
pencils, with a sharpenable eraser at the "lead" end and a stiff
nylon brush at the other end. Either way, these tools made possible
erasure of individual typed letters. Business letters were typed on
heavyweight, high-rag-content bond paper, not merely to provide a
luxurious appearance, but also to stand up to erasure. Typewriter
eraser brushes were necessary for clearing eraser crumbs and paper
dust, and using the brush properly was an important element of
typewriting skill; if erasure detritus fell into the typewriter, a
small buildup could cause the typebars to jam in their narrow
supporting grooves.

Erasing a set of carbon copies was particularly difficult, and
called for the use of a device called an eraser shield (a
stainless steel rectangle about 2" x 3" with several tiny holes in
it) to prevent the pressure of erasing on the upper copies from
producing carbon smudges on the lower copies. To correct each copy,
the typist had to go from carbon copy to carbon copy, trying not to
get their fingers dirty as they leafed through the carbon papers,
and moving and repositioning the eraser shield and eraser for each
copy.

Paper companies produced a special form of typewriter paper called
erasable bond (for example, Eaton's Corrasable Bond). This
incorporated a thin layer of material that prevented ink from
penetrating and was relatively soft and easy to remove from the
page. An ordinary soft pencil eraser could quickly produce perfect
erasures on this kind of paper. However, the same characteristics
that made the paper erasable made the characters subject to
smudging due to ordinary friction and deliberate alteration after
the fact, making it unacceptable for business correspondence,
contracts, or any archival use.

In the 1950s and 1960s, correction
fluid made its appearance, under brand names such as Liquid Paper, Wite-Out
and Tipp-Ex; it was invented by a woman
typist who was also an artist. Correction fluid was a kind of
opaque, white, fast-drying paint that produced a fresh white
surface onto which, when dry, a correction could be retyped.
However, when held to the light, the covered-up characters were
visible, as was the patch of dry correction fluid (which was never
perfectly flat, and never a perfect match for the color, texture,
and luster of the surrounding paper). The standard trick for
solving this problem was photocopying
the corrected page, but this was possible only with high quality
photocopiers. Not surprisingly, given the demand, photocopier
quality improved quickly.

In actual practice, more than one correction method was often used.
For example, if six extra copies of a letter were needed, the
fluid-corrected original would be photocopied, but only for the two
recipients getting "c.c."s; the other four copies, the
less-important file copies that stayed in various departments at
the office, would be cheaper, hand-erased, less-distinct bond paper
copies or even "flimsies" of different colors (tissue papers
interleaved with black carbon paper) that were all typed as a
"carbon pack" at the same time as the original.

Dry correction products (such as correction paper) under brand names such as
"Ko-Rec-Type" were introduced in the 1970s and functioned like
white carbon paper. A strip of the product was placed over the
letters needing correction, and the incorrect letters were retyped,
causing the black character to be overstruck with a white overcoat.
Similar material was soon incorporated in carbon-film electric
typewriter ribbons; like the traditional two-color black-and-red
inked ribbon common on manual typewriters, a black and white
correcting ribbon became commonplace on electric typewriters. But
this black or white powder could be partly rubbed off with
handling, and so such corrections were generally not acceptable in
legal documents.

The pinnacle of this kind of technology was the IBM Electronic Typewriter series. These machines, and
similar products from other manufacturers, used a separate
correction ribbon and a character memory. With a single keystroke,
the typewriter was capable of automatically reversing and
overstriking the previous characters with minimal marring of the
paper. White cover-up or plastic lift-off correction ribbons are
used with fabric ink or carbon film typing ribbons,
respectively.

Authors and writers who had unusual relationships with
typewriters

Early adopters

The philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche used a typewriter in an attempt to stem his migraine
headaches and his incipient blindness.

Others

E.E.Cummings may have been the first poet
to deliberately use a typewriter for poetic effect. His grasshopper poem is perhaps the most famous
example.

William S.Burroughs wrote in some of his
novels—and possibly believed—that "a machine he called the 'Soft
Typewriter' was writing our lives, and our books, into existence,"
according to a book review in The New Yorker. And, in the
film adaptation of his novel, "Naked Lunch," his typewriter is a
living, insect-like entity (voiced by Canadian actor Peter
Boretski) and actually dictates the book to him.

Writer Zack Helm and director Mark Forster explored the potential
mechanics of the 'Soft Typewriter' philosophy in the movie
"Stranger than Fiction" ... in which the very act of typing up her
handwritten notes gives a fiction writer the power to kill or
otherwise manipulate her main character in real life.

Ernest Hemingway used to write his
books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on
a tall bookshelf. This typewriter, still on its bookshelf, is
kept in Finca Vigia, Hemingway's
Havana house (now a museum) where he lived until 1960—the
year before his death.

Jack Kerouac, a fast typist at 100
words per minute, typed On the
Road on a roll of paper so he wouldn't be interrupted by
having to change the paper. Within two weeks of starting to write
On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120
feet long. Some scholars say the scroll was shelf paper; others
contend it was a Thermo-fax roll; another theory is that the roll
consisted of sheets of architect’s paper taped together. Another
fast typist of the Beat period was Richard Brautigan, who said that he
thought out the plots of his books in detail beforehand, then typed
them out at speeds approaching 90 to 100 words a minute.

Tom Robbins waxes philosophical about
the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker, and
eventually does away with it because it is too complicated and
inhuman of a machine for the writing of poetry.

A suite of songs entitled "Green Typewriters" is on The Olivia
Tremor Control's album Dusk At
Cubist Castle, and the sounds of typewriters can be heard in a
few of the sections.

Estonian prog-rock band In Spe features
typewriter as a rhythmic instruments in their album Typewriter
Concerto in D.

Thomas Dolby used typewriter sounds
(keys and bell) in the track Dissidents from his second
album The Flat Earth.

In film

The 1970s movie All the
President's Men features Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman
in a newsroom full of typewriters being used noisily.

In the 1982 movie Tron, when the Master Control Program's
defenses are destroyed, he reverts to his core form of an old man.
The sound of typewriters is heard, associating him with obsolete
technology.

In the 1985 movie Jagged Edge, a Corona typewriter
with a raised "t" plays a major role in discovering who the
murderer is.

Typewriters in songs and ambient typewriter sounds are present
throughout the 1985 movie Brazil.

Typewriters transform into monsters in David Cronenberg's 1991
film based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch.

Typewriters are foundational in the soundtrack and the plot for
the 2007 film Atonement.

The Internet

Typewriters are used to write typecast blogs in which text is typed on a manual typewriter
and then scanned for posting on blogs, a practice called typecasting.

Television

In the closing logo for his
production company, Stephen J.Cannell is seen typing at his
desk. The moment he finishes, Cannell pulls the paper from his
typewriter and tosses it. The paper toss segues into a
black-and-white animation of a sheet of paper becoming his
company's logo.

In the very popular television show Murder, She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher,
played by Angela Lansbury is seen in
the opening credits and in a few scenes throughout several episodes
in different seasons using a typewriter to type her murder mystery
novels.

On the show NCIS, McGee Types his books on
a typewriter. Two people are killed because one of "Thom's" fans
digs through McGee's trash and finds his typewriter ribbons that
has all of his "free writing" ideas, and almost gets Abby
killed.

In Phineas and Ferb's Musical Cliptastic Countdown, one of
Major's agents, Agent M (a monkey) is typing cue cards using a
typewriter. Doofenshmirtz criticizes the use of such a machine,
commenting that most of the kids watching right now have not even
seen a typewriter.

Forensic identification

Identifying the make and model of typewriters is part of questioned document
examination. Because of the tolerances of the mechanical parts,
slight variation in the alignment of the letters and their uneven
wear, each typewriter has its individual "signature" or "fingerprint", allowing a typewritten document to
be tracked back to the
typewriter it was produced on. The ribbon ink can also be
analyzed.